You're arguing against something that I didn't say. Please read closer next time. I agree with you... there's no "license" requirement. There's only an ethical requirement that taking from the CPAN also means giving to the CPAN, and a similar requirement that someone be participating with the community to be an "expert" according to many people.

What's cool and not cool is, well, really a matter of subjective opinion. You have yours, and you've made it known. People may agree and disagree with it (the latter group is way more likely to respond, so I'm not going to draw conclusions from the way the posts are going). But it is there.

Now you're saying

There's only an ethical requirement that taking from the CPAN also means giving to the CPAN

That's a huge jump from "cool" to "ethical".

For many people, their advocacy of perl, the programming language, is simply to be effective with it. How did I get perl into our team at work? Simply by proving it to be orders of magnitude more effective than what we were doing (shell), and orders of magnitude better than the alternatives (C++ or Java) at what we were going to do with it (text manipulation and filesystem manipulation - two of perl's strongest points).

Depending on your employment contract, that may be the best you can do. You may not be allowed to contribute to CPAN - it took me 6 months to get management to approve my work on CPAN, for example, including one lengthy conversation with a corporate lawyer. You disparage the good they do for perl simply by being an example of perl's usefulness to their cow-orkers.

Even then, we've (well, you have - I wasn't on PM at the time) had one PM member who was prohibited from using PM at all for a period of time. (Yes, I read random nodes from time to time.) That time only ended when his employment ended. Any assumption or subjective requirement to be a member of the community devalued that member while so employed. I wonder if your statements say that tilly should have quit and starved to maintain his merlyn-sanctioned stature in the community.

Coming from other languages, I didn't join PM for about 3 years after starting to use perl. Perhaps I'm overly taken with the virtue of Hubris, but I would claim I had reasonable "expert" status prior to joining PM or releasing anything on CPAN. In C++, the man pages had URLs in them, but no concept of this type of community. So when perl's man pages also had URLs in them, I didn't even guess that there might be this type of community behind it. I just toughed my way through the learning curve based on the perl docs, especially perlstyle. My coding style may have changed somewhat since joining PM, but not significantly more than if I hadn't - as my coding style has changed slowly over the years anyway.

I've been labelled close-minded pretty much my entire life. But yet, for some reason, I can accept all programmers of perl into Perl. I'm not sure why you want to close the door on them. Ok, that's not quite a good analogy - I'm sure you'd accept them if they came in the PM door. You may even invite people you know outside the site (e.g., on c.l.p if you still participate in usenet). But you'll reject them as "Perl members" until they do so.

I note, Tanktalus, that you spelled it 'perl' in some places, yet I know you to be a competent Perl programmer and active in the community. This pretty much says it all, IMNSHO. There are probably lots of competent Perl programmers in the community who spell it "incorrectly", either because it's no big deal to them, or because they're being cantankerous. This shibboleth tells us nothing more than how someone chooses to spell 'Perl'.

I'm not. This is the first I've noticed a "work for me" clause to distinguish your opinions. You started out making what appeared to be a blanket statement about being "not into Perl." You never said, "I would demand a certain level of participation in the community from anyone I chose to extend an employment offer towards." If you had, I'm pretty sure you would have gotten a few more ++'s, a lot less --'s, and, by far more importantly, a completely different set of responses.

I see no problem in how an employer wishes to discern who will make a good employee. I have no issue that you probably would not want me working for you. (Probably for other reasons ;-}) That's your entitlement and your right, as far as I'm concerned. That I think you'd be losing out on a star performer (there's my overblown sense of Hubris again) is not really relevant to your decision process (or maybe it is - I've never been interviewed by you, nor am I likely to be).

Your original statements had no sense of this being an employment issue from the side of the employer. The thread started with the topic being from the other side - cog talking about evaluating potential employers. In that context, it would be like me evaluating how good of a perl employer you would be. And, given your zeal and knowledge of perl, that would be great. But given your ability to get your point across in a socially sensitive manner, I would predict a less-than-ideal working environment, which would not only affect my productivity, but my happiness as a person, and thus the reason why I probably will never be interviewed by you.

I may disagree with the way you evaluate candidates for employment, but I will not (and probably will never) disagree with your right to do so in whatever manner you believe is best for your company. All responses in this thread so far, however, have been without the benefit of the knowledge of your topic because you did nothing to dissuade anyone from believing you were on the original topic.

It's obviously your right to choose the people who work for you. But how can you say that you are "making no moral judgements about people" after saying "there's only an ethical requirement that taking from the CPAN also means giving to the CPAN", and then get surprised by the reaction? That's what I find surprising.